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The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Fusion Science and Technology
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Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Alain Godot, Célia Lepeytre, Jean-Charles Hubinois, Aurélien Arseguel, Jean-Pierre Daclin, Christophe Douche
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 54 | Number 1 | July 2008 | Pages 231-234
Technical Paper | Waste Handling | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1802
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This method enables an indirect, non intrusive and non destructive measurement of the Tritium activity in wastes drums. The amount of tritium enclosed inside a wastes drum can be determined by the measurement of the leak rate of 3He of this latter.The simulation predicts that a few months are necessary for establishing the equilibrium between the 3He production inside the drum and the 3He drum leak.In practice, after one year of storage, sampling 3He outside the drum can be realized by the mean of a confining chamber that collect the 3He outflow.The apparatus, the experimental procedure and the calculation of tritium activity from mass spectrometric 3He measurements are detailed. The industrial device based on a confinement cell and the automated process to measure the 3He amount at the initial time and after the confinement time is described.Firstly, reference drums containing a certified tritium activity (HTO) in addition to organic materials have been measured to qualify the method and to evaluate its performances.Secondly, tritium activity of organic wastes drums issued from the storage building in Valduc have been determined.Results of the qualification and optimised values of the experimental parameters are reported in order to determine the performances of this industrial device.As a conclusion, the apparatus enables the measurement of an activity as low as 1 GBq of tritium in a 200 liters drum containing organic wastes.